PARIS (AP) — France’s powerful lower house voted finally to scrub a fundamental slavery-era edict from French law on Thursday.After the National Assembly voted 254-0 to adopt the bill to repeal Code Noir, it now goes to the Senate, where supporters expect it to be approved as well. It’s not clear when the Senate vote will happen.Code Noir — or Black Code — was signed by King Louis XIV at Versailles Palace in 1685 to set the rules for slavery across France’s colonial empire.It was described as “the most monstrous legal text of modern times” by French philosopher Louis Sala‑Molins. Its 60 articles first governed the French Caribbean — Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti — and were later extended to French Guiana, Louisiana, and the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius.
Deaths outpaced birthsFrance shipped about 1.4 million Africans across the Atlantic in chains — the third-largest slave trade of any European power, after Portugal and Britain.Most were put to cutting sugar cane and feeding the boiling houses, where the syrup was reduced over open fires, alongside coffee, cotton and indigo. The work was so deadly that deaths surpassed births. Planters simply replaced the dead with fresh shiploads of Africans.By 1789, Saint-Domingue — now Haiti — held around 500,000 enslaved people, more than any other Caribbean colony. It produced much of the world’s sugar and coffee, and was fabled to be the richest colony on earth.Code Noir became toothless when France abolished slavery in 1848, but no one ever formally struck it from the books.
